The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson by Georgia Douglas Johnson

The salon was a meeting place for writers in Washington, D.C. Georgia Douglas Johnson's house at 1461 South Street NW would later become known as the S Street Salon. Soon after her husband's death, Johnson began to host what became 40 years of weekly 'Saturday Salons' for friends and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké and Eulalie Spence - all major contributors to the New Negro Movement, which is better known today as the Harlem Renaissance. Isolationism and anti-feminist prejudice however prevented the sturdy African-American women like Johnson from getting their remembrance and impact with such contributions. Her poems describe African Americans and their mental attitude once having faced prejudice towards them and the way they modify it. Johnson's anti-lynching activism was expressed through her plays such as The Ordeal, which that was printed in Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro. Hull, through a black feminist critical perspective, appointed herself the task of informing those within the dark of the very fact that African-American women, like Georgia Douglas Johnson, are being excluded from being thought of as key voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Gloria Hull in her book Color, Sex, and Poetry, argues that Johnson's work ought to be placed in an exceedingly distinguished place within the Harlem Renaissance, and that for African-American women writers 'they desperately need and deserve long overdue scholarly attention'. The organization sought a federal anti-lynching bill. Johnson was also a member of the Writers League Against Lynching, which included Countée Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Alain Locke.

Though she was involved in the NAACP's anti-lynching campaigns of 19, the NAACP refused to produce many of her plays claiming they gave a feeling of hopelessness. As a result, Johnson had difficulty getting plays published. Unlike many African-American playwrights, Johnson refused to give her plays a happy ending since she did not feel it was a realistic outcome. This outspoken, dramatic writing about racial violence is sometimes credited with her obscurity as a playwright since such topics were not considered appropriate for a woman at that time. Her activism is primarily expressed through her plays, first appearing in the play Sunday Morning in the South in 1925. Although Johnson spoke out against race inequity as a whole, she is more known as a key advocate in the anti-lynching movement as well as a pioneering member of the lynching drama tradition.

The Selected Works of Georgia Douglas Johnson by Georgia Douglas Johnson